ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how and why Premchand's translation of a foreign text seen as a new aesthetic. Also, given that Premchand kept a close watch on each major event of national or international importance, was Shab-e-Tar, published four months after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, a camouflaged protest against British oppression and censorship. The chapter deals with Premchand's translational praxis in the context of Shab-e-Tar. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation in translation activities and it was also through the translation of European literature that Indians encountered European modernism. The symbolist's refusal to depict the empirical world as a reaction against realism and Impressionism was embedded in the wider cultural and political anxieties of late nineteenth-century Europe. Sujit Mukherjee argues that whether one translates or transcreates, the original work is renewed by being rendered into another language', and this is the least people expects when they regard translation as new writing.
